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Baby uses parents’ phone to buy Austin Healey on eBay

Parenting in the 21st century requires extensive monitoring of a young child's interactions with those magical devices we think of as phones. Once they stop chewing on them, it's not hard for even a toddler to start touching and swiping into trouble — like this 14-month-old Oregon girl who took her father's phone out of sight for a few minutes and managed to buy him a junked 1962 Austin Healey Sprite. Happy belated father's day!

According to KOIN-TV, Sorella Stoute managed to poke into the eBay app on her father Paul Stoute's phone, and from there it was only a "buy-it-now" tap to ownership of a British roadster — albeit one in pieces, with two engines sitting in the trunk.

Paul Stoute says after the initial flabbergasting, he and his wife decided to just keep the car, and since it was located a few miles away, they gently lifted it onto a trailer and brought it to its new home — at his parents' condo, since he doesn't have a garage. He's also started a crowdsourced fundraiser to restore the car, since he admits restoring the bodywork on a Sprite is beyond his skills.

If you're the least bit suspicious, you might think this sounds like a crafty cover story for an adult hiding a fat-fingered mistake. But after seeing the state of that Austin Healey, and the lack of a parental garage to store it in, I'm willing to believe it's the work of the younger Stoute. Only the most innocent mind would ever see something alluring in a torn-apart, 51-year-old British sports car.